What is an expert anymore if no one will believe experts? What is the point of the scientific method if no one accepts its outcome? How is anyone supposed to understand anything if no one can be trusted? Even the cold hard truth of numbers, once loved, goes shunned—because a biased human calculated it.

It’s a sign of the modern world that one can hear about some controversy via image macros, or reactionary posts on social media, before even getting an inkling of what’s fully going on in the physical world. And I will not say that’s not impressive, that’s effective viral marketing, but it’s not a great sign for public discourse.

How could a genre do something like this? How could it promote advancement, of robots helping out our daily lives, of automatic cars and devices making life easier, and yet turn around and spout the opposite? How could it say from its various mouths that we could see a Clearwater of hoverboards and holograms like Back to The Future or a nightmarish city like District 12 in The Hunger Games?